Tall Man version 2

“They said that He would teach us. Once I didn’t believe but now I do, Daddy hit me fearful hard and said that heretics face destruction like all those who had milled around in cities before God punished them. I didn’t know what cities are. He said they used to be full of the wretched and the miserable who had met a just end, but that since we are simple and righteous folk no hands will ever touch us. Everybody says that He is only the pure truth and during the day times, when I’m playing and running, I believe that. He is easy to believe in. But sometimes, mainly at night while laying on my cot in the darkness, He can be mighty scary.”

Little Jebediah speaks truthfully from his perch on top of a rusted shell of a car, his shoulders squared and thrust upwards, his faded and torn shirt hanging limply about his frame. His eyes, shrouded by dirt and grease, speak of an inner desperation that all people must come to know.

The Tall Man -- his real name had long ago grown rusty and forgotten from disuse -- sits on a fallen log of cedar, his knees and elbows jutting upwards and making him seem nothing more than an accumulation angles and arrows. Knots and locks of dark, almost black hair hang down around his face. He looks at the young boy in front of him but does not speak.

Jebediah knows that the Tall Man’s silence does not mean that he is uninterested. After all, he lives alone in the woods, and solitude like that can change the way a man thinks. He thinks that the Tall Man’s thoughts move slowly but with great weight, like the glaciers he has heard of in stories.

Stories are all that remain in these desolate days. Stories whispered clumisly, with voices wool tounged and out of breath.

The Tall Man holds his head between his hands. Thoughts form; pulsing machinations beneath his brow, and he sighs as cognitive strings coalesc out of his mind’s white-noise thought. He speaks, and Jebediah listens carefully.

“Son…I hurt for you. You are trapped between madness and madness, and have been fed great lies cloaked with small truths. I cannot tell you to leave his family, for your birth-parents and siblings still reside there, but it seems to me that you should always remember that all you ever have are facets of the truth. Some pictures won’t be revealed, and only a fool attempt to frame the whole world. But then again I am a hermit who is called a heretic, so everything I say might be a lie.”

The Tall Man picks himself up and turns away, walking into a field of weeds and tall grass whose golden stalks will mark his passage for only a moment.

***

Samuel Abel Fairweather, known as “He” to those he lords over, sits hunched in a throne of mahogany and leather, which rests in a building of groaning metal, constructed from the gutted remains of a RV and pensively sitting facing a field of metal skeletons of an age gone by: the remains of cars, engine parts, old and broken farm equipment, and others, which, although rusted, will shine like gold in the early morning, kissed by the alchemical sunlight.

Sheltered in the darkness, he sits shivering, running on empty after three days of snorting chunks of the dirty, yellow crank he secretly makes in a converted ‘shine still.

Spun out, teeth cracking. His skin is thin and gaunt, like aged paper stretched across something sharp. The tips of his fingers shine with a viscous coat of honey, gathered from the apiary by women wearing woolen dresses and foreboding bonnets, a delicacy that none may eat save he.

His office is a cluttered mess of objects that he believes help his priesthood; pieces of fused glass and scavenged metal hang from the ceiling, reflecting the light and tracing patterns and holy symbols on his skin as he moves throughout his day; a handful of metal sculptures made by his followers, twisted constructions that tried to recreate his most holy face out of the scavenged parts littering the fields; and, on the wall behind his shoddily built desk, there rests a crude mosaic depicting Fairweather’s illumination twenty years prior.

He knows that a new enemy is afoot, lurking right outside his grasp, a more immediate threat than any other, and he hates this enemy, this bitter force lurking beyond the tree line, mocking his power.

The Tall Man is coming and it could end mighty fearful.

***

The oatmeal makes a sucking noise as the sludge drips from his mother’s spoon into his bowl. Jebediah reaches across the table to tear off a piece of bread, and groans: “No meat today?”

His mother’s pinched eyes narrow, “Why Jebediah, you know that meat is forbidden on the Sabbath.”

Jebediah’s feet shuffle on the earthen floor of the shack, and he bites into the crusty, day-old bread. Chewing, he asks, “I know it says that, but why? It doesn’t make much sense to me, not when I think about it.”

She looks away from her child to her husband, who sits at the head of the table reading scripture. “Amos?” she asks.

Placing the holy book in his lap, Amos scratches his bearded face with his right hand, wincing as if pain. “Jebediah, you should know better. The way it is is the way it is, and it isn’t going to change just because you start asking questions. I’ll hear no more of this, you hear me?”

Jebediah nods, and eats the rest of his meal in silence. Finishing, he asks, “Can I go play now? I’ve done all my chores.”

His father’s voice, gruff and self-assured, answers: “Sabbath day is for contemplation and prayer, not play or work. You can go outside, but I want you to spend the day focusing on what we have been given and being thankful.”

Jebediah rushes outside, moving like an arrow to the waiting woods.

***

Fairweather walks the divide; passing tents and hovels, latrines and cooking pits, benevolently blessing those he passes by with a hand outstretched and shaking. Covering his fingers are metal hoops, their interiors barbed to chastise the flesh. The open wounds suppurate milky tears, the pain sending ecstatic shudders through his frame.

The path is of dirt and gravel, and stretches through the shanty town, casting off decrepit tributaries that lead to families and prayer halls and livestock pens, all the while ambling downwards, reaching its terminus at the hill’s bottom. From there, fields of corn and wheat and groves of oranges and peaches stretch outwards like a patchwork quilt. On most days these fields are populated with the movements of Fairweather’s flocks, but none move thus today, today is Sabbath, the Lord’s Day. Fairweather’s Day.

Quiet gasps from the crowd as their flagellant leader passes; they kneel down, mindless of the dirt and mud, some kissing the ground -- all of them seeing different things is his passing form, all of them tossing hope into his swallowing depths. The sky is full of ochre fists of clouds, poised and waiting, behind which the sun shines like intelligence through a cataract.

He wears a long robe, which just avoids the ground. The threads of black velvet squirm against his movement and his silhouette flickers in the heat, all making his gait seem nothing more than that of an absurd, wooden marionette.

A marionette indeed. But who pulls the strings?

Muttering to himself -- quiet blasphemies and solemn blessings -- his teeth grinding like an ivory hammer against an ivory anvil, he sees a man in a straw hat leaning against an iron gate and blowing through a harmonica. Oblivious, he thinks, a heretic.

The music drifts on the breeze. The man’s foot taps the time, smooth and unhurried. A mountain song, lively like a jig, its origins forgotten like all other origins jettisoned into history’s grinding engine.

Teeth snarl and velvet rustles as Fairweather rushes forward, his knuckles clenched into a hairy fist. He hits the man in the gut and pushes him to the ground. The man makes no exclamation of surprise save the wind leaving his lungs, and his mouth hangs open like a dying trout. Fairweather’s foot crushes the harmonica and then raises upwards, poised on the precipice of impending hammer fall.

A quiet beating in the mud.

Fairweather’s terrible face looms in the sky, glowing with a skeleton grin as his foot crashes down. Bones break and breath comes like ripped silk.

Fairweather looks skyward, mouthing silent words towards the empyrean that gives no sign of having heard. Reaching down, he grasps the man’s ankles and begins to drag him through the muddied path, making his way towards the cobblestone circle that marks the commune’s center.

The man babbles as he is pulled towards this esurient and unforgiving future. Nonsense words, oneiric and fevered: “But mama he said a green one a green one he said not too pointy cold where is the gate body and bread her kiss was wet that day not too sharp mama the toys are all gone I done it I done it all fall down.” His passing is marked by a furrow in the mud and by a dribbling of thick, almost purple blood.

Fairweather drops the man, making sure his head is resting against the cracked stones. Closing his eyes, Fairweather puts his hands together and prays. The clouds part and light adorns him, casting flames on his face and making his eyes seem black and distant. His shadow stretches far down the road.

“Thank you Lord,” he says. His foot ascends and descends, his leather boot marrying the victim’s head to the stones in an obscene sacrament, crushing away any semblance of a face, of a personality, of a life led.

A holy murder in the country wasteland.

From the gaping dehiscence of the victim’s skull run blood and thicker things that slide through the cracks of the cobblestones, forming some russet symbol both unimaginable and unavoidable, a dark and vicious rune imprinted in the village’s diseased heart.

The people crowd around the violence, prostrate on the ground -- none dare look or object -- on their knees, small, shriveled, too far removed from something essential -- their faces make love to the ground’s filth.

A child looks up briefly, his face blank and awed and speckled with freckles of blood.
Fairweather steps forward, and his thick curved thumb carves the blood into a cross on the boy’s face.

“You are blessed,” he whispers, and the boy smiles

Fairweather steps back, elated, his eyes full of shine, glowing and electric, and, knowing that he does the Lord’s work, he raises his hand to the sky;

“A sacrifice! My people, much is asked of you, and the burden is hard to bear…but you must, you must! There is only one law; strangle the last oppressor with the entrails of the last heretic. Holy flames are too bright to look at—they consume. There is no mercy here. There is only Me, God’s chosen messenger—DO NOT STRAY!”

No one moves; they sit huddled, just effigies in the mud, broken forms on the landscape; the sun dies towards the horizon and this last-light bathes the frozen figures, turning them to bronze shells, tarnished and hollow.

Fairweather turns, skipping lightly and whistling, his movements vertiginous, his melody jubilant…and he moves back towards his throne room.

Upon reaching his destination he pauses under the tin awning, muttering to himself, and though the words are faint and muddled one phrase rises above the others: “There is no exit.”